Solomon Gursky Was Here (11 page)

“How about a hundred and twenty?”

Fortunately, Strawberry's lawyer intervened at this point. He was the judge's nephew and the local Liberal party bagman. Strawberry got off with a suspended sentence and everybody repaired to Gilmore's Corner to celebrate. They made three more pit stops before they ended up at The Beaver Lodge in Magog. “My great-grandaddy Ebenezer used to drink here,” Strawberry told Moses, pointing out a sign over the bar that had been salvaged from the original hotel, destroyed by fire in 1912.

WM. CROSBY'S HOTEL

The undersigned, thankful for past favours

bestowed upon this

LONG-ESTABLISHED HOTEL

is determined to conduct this establishment in a

manner that will meet the approbation of the public,

and therefore begs a continuance of Public Patronage.

REFRESHMENTS SERVED AT ANY HOUR

OF DAY OR NIGHT

Wm. Crosby

Proprietor

The next afternoon Moses phoned Henry Gursky, in the Arctic, and borrowed enough money to buy the cabin high in the woods overlooking Lake Memphremagog.

Strawberry, Moses discovered, painted houses between drinks. He could also be driven to cut wood or plough snow. But, for the most part, he was content to hibernate through the winter on the fat of his welfare cheque. “Hey, I coulda been rich, a big landowner,” Strawberry once said, “if not for what my crazy great-grandaddy done. Old Ebenezer Watson gave up the bottle for God, a big mistake, joining up with a bunch of religious nuts called the Millenarians. Eb lost just about everything, his life included. All that was left was some ninety acres of the old family farm. It went to Abner, my grandaddy.”

Strawberry failed to turn up the next afternoon. Moses was seated alone when one of the rich cottagers stumbled into The Caboose. Clearly distressed, he held a slip of paper before him like a shield to guard against contagious diseases.
“Pardonnez moi,”
he said,
“mais je cherche—”

“We speak English here,” Bunk said.

“I'm looking for Mr. Strawberry Watson, the house painter. I was told he lived up on the hill, just past Maltby's Pond, but the only house I could see there is obviously abandoned. It's unpainted, the grass hasn't been cut, and the yard is full of rusting automobile parts.”

“You found it, mister.”

T
HE DAY MOSES DROVE IN
from the clinic in New Hampshire, Gord, who owned The Caboose, was tending bar. He wore a black T-shirt embossed with a multi-coloured dawn. A slogan was stencilled over it:

I'M FEELING SO HORNY

Even The Crack of Dawn Looks Good To Me.

After a hard Saturday night Gord's first wife, Madge, had died in a head-on collision on the 105, totalling their brand new Dodge pickup in the bargain, and ever since Gord wouldn't hear of buying another new truck. “I mean, shit, you drive it out of the dealer's lot and five minutes later it's already second-hand, ain't it? Like my new wife.”

His new wife was the widow Hawkins. The courtship had been brief. One afternoon, only a couple of months after he had buried Madge, Gord got into a bad fight in The Thirsty Boot with Sneaker over his wife, Suzy. Actually Sneaker wasn't living with his wife at the time, but was shacked up with a hooker from the Venus di Milo in a trailer tucked into the woods off the 112 Still, he resented anybody else cutting his grass. Gord made the mistake of saying, “I don't know why you ever left her. As far as I'm concerned, she's still awful good fucking, eh?”

Gord, nursing a sore jaw and a couple of loose teeth, carried on to The Snakepit, Crystal Lake Inn, Chez Bobby, and the Brome Lake Hotel, stopping somewhere along the line to buy supplies at a
dépanneur
. Tins of baked beans and soups, a bag of frozen fries, some TV dinners, and a big bag of Fritos. He also bought a chicken and made straight for the widow Hawkins's cabin in South Bolton, kicking in the door at two
A.M.
“I'm tired of eatin' shit. So this here is a chicken,” he said. “Got it at a
dépanneur
. You cook it good for my dinner tomorrow night and I'll fucken marry you. But if it's tough, forget it, eh?”

Gord liked to post items clipped from the
Gazette
on his notice board. Once it was the news that troopers in Vermont had arrested a man wanted for the serial murders of thirty-two women within the past five years.

“He sure as hell shouldn'ta done that,” Strawberry said. “There ain't enough of them to go around as it is.”

One of the men who frequented The Caboose ran a gravel pit, another owned a dairy farm, others picked up carpentry jobs here and there, and still more worked as caretakers or handymen for the rich cottagers on the lake. For most of them it was a matter of stitching twenty weeks of summer work together in order to qualify for unemployment insurance in the winter. Failing that they went on welfare, bolstering their take on the barter system. If Sneaker painted Gord's barn he came away with a side of beef. If Legion Hall retiled Mike's roof he could have the hay from the field across the road and sell it in Vermont for $2.50 a bundle. The men owned their own cottages, cut their own winter wood, and counted on shooting a deer
in November. Some of the wives worked on the assembly line in the Clairol factory in Knowlton and others served as cleaning ladies for the cottagers on the lake. The wives, who usually gathered at their own tables in The Caboose, ran to fat, bulging out of tank tops and stretchy pink polyester slacks.

Moses usually avoided The Caboose on Friday night, Band Night, which brought out the noisy younger crowd, who were quickly herded into the basement, where—according to Strawberry—they smoked Hi-Test. “You know, whacky tobaccy.” But he seldom failed to turn up for the Sunday night steak dinner because Gord's father, old Albert Crawley, was always there. Albert remembered Solomon Gursky from the days, during Prohibition, when he used to run convoys of the booze into Vermont through the old Leadville road. More than once, Albert said, the word out, the road bristling with customs men or hijackers, they had hidden the stuff in the old talc mine, which had been in the Gursky family since 1852. Other times they had unloaded the shipment at Hector Gagnon's farm, which straddled the border, packed it in saddlebags that were strapped to the backs of cattle, and drove the herd into Vermont at three
A.M.

After Albert was badly wounded one night, taking it in the gut, Solomon set him up in a hotel in Abercorn, and weekends couples drove in from as far away as Boston and New York. W.C. Fields had slept there. So had Fanny Brice. Once Dutch Schultz, accompanied by Charles “the Bug” Workman, had come to look over the hotel, but Albert had sent for Solomon, who had hurried out from Montreal with some girls from the Normandy Roof Bar, smoothing everything out nicely. Then along came Repeal, rendering the hotel redundant, and it became necessary to burn it down for the insurance money.

Whenever Moses turned up at The Caboose after a long absence Gord would send somebody to fetch his father. He would also, as he did the day Moses drove back from New Hampshire, unlock a cabinet under the bar and fish out a bottle of Glenlivet, which Albert and Moses, in a joke they never tired of, would call Glen Levitt. This in remembrance of the time Mr. Bernard, never a great speller, had ordered the wrong labels for a shipment, endearing himself to Solomon for once.

“Legion Hall has a pile of mail for you,” Strawberry said.

“Let the man enjoy his drink,” Albert said.

“Hold the phone, he don't any more.”

“Again?”

“Yeah.”

Albert Crawley's head bobbed upright. He began to laugh and cough at the same time, heaving, spilling tears and phlegm. “If I could drink with Solomon Gursky just one more time they could plant me happy tomorrow.” Then his head slumped forward and in his mind's eye Albert Crawley was out there with Solomon again, standing in the dark of Hector Gagnon's farm on this side of the border, waiting for the long overdue blinking headlights from the other side, a perplexed Solomon digging out his cherished gold pocket watch again, the watch that had once belonged to his grandfather and was engraved:

From W.N. to E.G.

de bono et malo.

Albert had held his cigarette lighter to Solomon's watch and the instant it had flared the firing had started and Solomon had pulled Albert down into the tall grass with him, but too late.

“Pour me another one of them Glen Levitts, will you, Moses?”

Nine

Moses was wakened the next morning by a phone call from Gitel Kugelmass's daughter. Gitel had been arrested for shop-lifting at Holt Renfrew. Other ladies, Moses reflected, might be caught pilfering at Miracle Mart, even Eaton's, but for
die Roite Gitel
it had to be Montreal's classiest emporium. Moses agreed to drive into Montreal and take Gitel to lunch at the Ritz “for a talk,” something he hadn't done for several years.

In her late seventies, somewhat shrunken but unbent, Gitel still favoured a big floppy hat, a fox collar more moth-eaten than ever, antique rings. But her startling makeup, more suitable to a harlequin, was applied with a tremulous hand now, an unsure eye. A nimbus of too-generously applied powder trailed after her. Cheeks burning bright with rouge suggested fever more readily than
femme fatale
.

“I realize,” Moses said, “that you meant to pay for the perfume, you forgot, but please be careful in the future, Gitel, now that you have been charged once.”

She thought it best not to correct him. Instead she said, “Isn't all property theft?”

“Yes, certainly, but there are still some unenlightened running dogs of capitalism about who see things differently.”

They fell to reminiscing about the dining-room table with the crocheted tablecloth, L.B. reading one of his stories aloud.

“Were you too young to remember, Moishe, when Kronitz carried me off to the mountains to take his pleasure with me?”

Bits of green pasta adhered to her feathery moustache and clacky dentures.

“Too young to remember? Gitel, it broke my heart.”

Kronitz had been carried off by cancer long since. Kugelmass, hopelessly dotty, was wasting in the Jewish Old People's Home. Gitel dabbed at her tears with a black lace handkerchief, an Ogilvy's price tag dangling from one of its corners. “Does anybody care about our stories now? Who will sing our songs, Moishe, or remember me when my breath was still sweet?”
Die Roite Gitel
fumbled in her handbag and brought out a sterling silver compact. “Birks,” she said. “Now tell me how come a handsome boy like you, such a catch, isn't married yet with children?”

“Well, Gitel, if only I had been somewhat older and you just a little younger,” he said, reaching out to squeeze her knee, frail as a chicken bone.

“Oh you're such a devil you. So why did you ever break up with Solomon Gursky's daughter? What's her name? Remind me.”

“Lucy.”

“Lucy. Of course. Everything she touches on Broadway turns to gold. If it's a hit, she's got a piece of it. And her dacha in Southampton, it was featured in
People,
you could die. She collects those paintings, you know the kind I mean, they look like blow-ups from comic books. Oy, what a world we live in today. Did you know that the Chinese now rent out railway crews and construction gangs to richer Asian countries? Fifty years after the Long March they're back in the coolie business.”

“And
die Roite Gitel
reads
People
.”

“Moishe, you could have been living on easy street.”

“Like father, like son.”

“Shame on you. I never blamed L.B. for writing those speeches for Mr. Bernard. As for the others, with the exception of Shloime Bishinsky and maybe Schneiderman, it was envy pure and simple. Those days. My God, my God. Before you were even a
bar mitzvah
boy, the Gurskys were mobsters as far as our group was concerned. Capitalism's ugliest face, as we used to say. Then when I led the girls out against Fancy Finery during that terrible heat wave you could die, certainly nobody could sleep, and there was
bupkes
left in our pathetic strike fund, guess what? Knock knock at my door. Who's there? Not the RCMP this time. Not the provincials again. But
Solomon's man, your buddy Tim Callaghan with a satchel and in it there is twenty-five thousand dollars in hard cash and that isn't the best of it. Buses will pick up the strikers and their kids on Friday afternoon to take them to the mountains for a week. Everybody's invited. What are you talking about, I say? Even Solomon Gursky can't have a big enough house in the mountains for that bunch. They're going to Ste.-Adèle, Callaghan says, and there will be rooms for everybody. Tell them to bring bathing suits. Hey, hey there, I say, Ste.-Adèle's restricted, no Jews or dogs on the beach. Just make sure, Callaghan says, that everybody's gathered outside here by four o'clock.

“So when they finally put Solomon on trial I naturally had to get to see our benefactor up close. It wasn't easy. Listen, you'd think it was John Barrymore playing His Majesty's Theatre, or today say one of those rockers who dress like girls singing at the Forum, you had to line up for hours before the courtroom opened. Not only Jews waiting to get in, but
mafiosi
from the States. And big-shot
goyishe
lawyers there to take notes if one of their bosses' names is taken in vain. And all those debutantes of his, mooning over him. I didn't blame them one bit. If Solomon Gursky had curled his little finger at me, I would have quit the Party. Anything. But it wasn't me he had eyes for. It was obviously somebody who never turned up.”

Yes, Moses thought, one eye brown, one eye blue.

“Every time the courtroom door opened he looked up from the table, but it was never whoever he was waiting for.”

“Were you in court when the customs inspector testified?”
This country,
Solomon had written in his journal,
has no tap root. Instead there's Bert Smith. The very essence
.